If Grey’s Anatomy set at Quantico with a long-term terrorism plot sounds bad to you, proceed no further: This is not your show. If it sounds kind of appealing, as it does to me, Quantico may be your least execrable show of fall.... The pilot doesn’t dwell on the senseless carnage, and if you don't either, what’s left is sexed-up spy games.

Though the show is quick and exciting in its particulars, slick and captivating in its details, it is unfolding slowly as a whole, with perhaps one too many investigations, conspiracies, return-of-the-repressed traumas, and busy backstories curling leisurely into view.

Weeds is still trying a little too hard—trying, by turns, to be edgy and HBO-ish or campy and ABC-ish. But if it hasn't yet quite achieved the self-confident swagger of HBO flagships like The Wire or The Sopranos, it's certainly a lot more fun to watch than Desperate Housewives.

Perhaps it's best to consider The Hour as a kind of retro Broadcast News that is most alive when Freddie and Bel banter like Beatrice and Benedick and especially when getting inside of Hector's talking head.

As with last year’s My Week with Marilyn, Burton and Taylor avoids retreading familiar material by picking a relatively quiet, unexplored interlude in a celebrity’s life--the stuff of tasteful restraint, but not exactly scintillating story. And it only scans as tasteful restraint if the audience can fill in all the salacious history for themselves. For those who can, Burton and Taylor is much more effective.

What makes the show something better than a guilty pleasure is the way that, after introducing its subjects as borderline-reprehensible cartoons, it allows them flickers of self-awareness or shows them trying their damnedest to be terrific parents.

In the early episodes, all the clatter and the clutter shut out what’s good about the show: Zeke, his devotion to Shao, and his adorable romance with Mylene. The first episode, with a run time of close to an hour and a half, is almost unwatchable. But the show improves from there, sloughing off side characters and gaining momentum.

It is still psychologically astute, but it has become a much more straightforward, and largely effective, spy show. If you do not want to let Homeland back into your heart, that’s understandable. But maybe let it crash on your couch for a probationary period.

Like Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the paranoid screenplays of Andrew Niccol, and the absurdist horror of Black Sheep (an ovine analog of The Birds), it gets beneath the skin by examining the state of isolation at the bottom of the world.

It lacks the nuance and cleverness that Star brought to Sex and the City while also missing all the chaotic joy that Broad City and Girls find in this slice of millennial life.... That’s not to say it isn’t compulsively watchable.

Justified is slumming it: not nearly as sharp or rich as it has been or could be, but still much more clever and enjoyable than its procedural peers. It’s begging to be graded on a curve, when it should be setting it.

A black comedy working many shades of gray, Enlightened is about dark mornings of the soul and the fool's-golden glow of the new convert, and it measures the weight of the world with an eccentric scale.